A Contract of Trust

These days there are contracts all written out
So there is nothing to dispute about
But if a person won’t stand on his word understood
A piece of paper won’t make it good

This poem is featured in a DVD documentary on the Cattlemen of Florida. (If you are interested in a part of Florida history not well known, but is still an on-going way of life, I'd highly recommend it.) The words brought to mind an essay I recently read in the book that I've been citing from time-to-time on this blog, The Trustworthiness of God: Perspectives on the Nature of Scripture.

The book features contributors from the disciplines Old Testament, New Testament, and from historical, theological, and philosophical perspectives.  All of these essays also include discussion of the literary features of the biblical text. But it was Carl Trueman's words that particularly stood out to me and I think the poem expresses in microcosm the Christian's trust in the Scriptures and trusting the God of the Scriptures. Trueman writes:

A promise, unlike certain other statements, is by its very nature something that must involve an interpersonal relationship. As long as a promise is the immediate object of trust, therefore, talk about faith in God cannot be reduced to the level of, say, bare belief in a factual proposition such as “All swans are white.”

Faith inevitably involves some element of cognition, but it cannot be reduced to mere cognition. In addition, promises require that certain conditions hold true for the faith invested in them to be done in a worthwhile and proper manner. First, the promiser must have the ability to deliver on his or her promise: the bankrupt who promises to give his creditors all that he owes them may well wish to do so, but his financial situation means that the promise is ultimately worthless and unworthy of faith.

Second, in addition to the ability, the promiser must have the intention of delivering on the promise. The woman who promises to buy her child a present but who has no intention of doing so has made a promise that, again, is not worthy of trust because it is not backed up by the necessary disposition.

In other words, that which makes the promise valid, which makes it worthy of trust or faith, is the person who promises, and whose ability and intention serve to make the promise good. A promise must carry with it certain implications about the one promising…

…the promise is deemed trustworthy because the words of promise are themselves a revelation of who God is. It is this basic understanding of God’s trustworthiness, tying his words to his disposition towards humanity, which lies at the heart of Reformation understanding of salvation; and it is this that is one of the key factors in focusing the Protestant theological tradition upon the phenomenon of Scripture. Faith in God’s promise presupposes that God is who his promise reveals him to be, and thus it places God’s revelation of himself right at the heart of the theological task. (pp. 176-77)

The bottom line? God is trustworthy because he has the intention and the ability to deliver on his promise. God cannot be separated from his word. He is a speaking God. He has done so through many diverse manners (Heb. 1:1).

I was originally going to stop with Trueman's quote because I think it is a very solid and clear statement regarding the nature of God and his promises. It seems, however, this post will be of the longer, more researched variety.

One reason is because of an article Trueman wrote in 2009, recently run again on Reformation 21 and featured in the book The Wages of Spin. The point of the article is the accommodation of the church's worship to the culture or the study of theology to university academia in order to appear "respectable."  What caught my attention was his reference to the very book I have been reading.

I have always been amazed at the infatuation of so many orthodox academics with their reputation in the secular universities and liberal departments. A few years back, I edited a book with Paul Helm on the doctrine of scripture.  At the time I was on faculty at the University of Aberdeen.  One colleague - a friend but one of distinctly liberal leanings -referred matter-of-factly in a public lecture to the upcoming book as representing the tradition of Warfield, of which he himself did not approve; but the comment was not a sneer; rather it was a simple statement of his impression of the book.

Within a couple of days I received an email from one of the contributors, asking if this was the case and saying that, if so, he wanted to withdraw from participation.  Now, it was not actually the case: the book addressed the issue of scripture from a different direction to the concerns of Warfield; but what puzzled me - no, what disappointed me, for I understood exactly what was going on - was that this person was so terrified of being associated with Warfield. I wonder to this day if he would have been so concerned if he had been invited to contribute to a collection of essays that someone said pointed in a Barthian or Bultmannian direction.

My brow furrowed as I read this because I could not recall B.B. Warfield's name being mentioned by any of the contributers, save one. I looked at the citations for all of them and only one, Timothy Ward, even cites Warfield and it is for all of two pages.

Ward examines one aspect of Warfield's view of Scripture, with positive and negative criticisms, and in the end concludes that Warfield "lacks, simply by virtue of his particular historical location, a set of conceptualities that would allow him to articulate a sophisticated approach to the genre, literary characteristics, and communicative purpose of the whole biblical text being studied" (p. 196). Ward goes on to unpack the discipline of "intertextuality" and cite scholars and literary critics I have never heard of and use newly coined terms I had difficulty understanding without a second read.

That's it. This unnamed contributor Trueman cites wanted off a project so as not to be associated with Warfield, who is mentioned may be 10 times, in two pages, in a nearly 300-page book. In fact, Warfield is the only name from the Old Princeton School brought into the discussion. There is no mention of Charles Hodge, William Henry Greene, Geerhardus Vos, J. Gresham Machen, Oswald Allis, etc.

The other contributers do a fine job of showing how Scripture displays the trustworthiness of God, reading widely and citing authors very few have ever heard of outside of an academic setting.

The Word of God and the real Word of God?

Another point is the relation of God's word to himself. To go back to Trueman's original quote stating, "the words of promise are themselves a revelation of who God is...Faith in God’s promise presupposes that God is who his promise reveals him to be, and thus it places God’s revelation of himself right at the heart of the theological task."

So close is the tie between God and his word that John 1:1 masterfully articulates the coming of Christ, in the vein of Genesis, saying, "In the beginning was the Word..." And then to further add to the amazing revelation the Fourth Gospel states, "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14).

However, there is much debate in some circles as to how Jesus is said to be the Word of God and the Bible is the Word of God.  Karl Barth and the "neo-orthodox" theology movement was and still is influential in this regard, though authors like Peter Enns have addressed this from other perspectives.

This recently came to bear in some *comments I made on a blog regarding the nature of God's presence and if it is limited to Scripture.  In part of my answer I state,

There is a reciprocal nature between the Word and Spirit. 
To answer the question, ‘How do we know the Bible is the word of God?’ with ‘Because the Bible says it is the word of God’ would be an example of circular reasoning. But the answer should be, ‘The Holy Spirit testifies that it is the word of God.’ But how do we know about the Holy 
Spirit? Through the Scripture. That is what I would call reciprocal reasoning. They depend on each other.

Someone replied with the question, “Is it truer to say the Bible is the Word of God or Jesus Christ is the Word of God?”

I responded, "The short answer is “Yes.” It is Both/And." Jesus makes many statements about himself, such as "I am the vine" - "I am the bread of life" - "I am the light of the world."  In my longer answer I state,

I think it's also important to remember that Jesus never referred to himself as the Word of God. That was said by John. And John said, "These things are written so that..." Like those in the Old Covenant who preached as witnesses for I AM and his word, so John and the Apostles of the New Covenant preached as witnesses of Jesus Christ and his word.

Even though Jesus never said, "I am the Word of God", the fourth gospel declares him to be so. At first it may have been through preaching and teaching (specifically of the Apostle John), but eventually it was through writing, which John does "so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name" (20:31). It could be said that there are historical, experiential, and propositional threads in what John is saying.

There is an epistemological aspect (how do we know?) to all this as well. Again the same person replied to my answer:

“In your original posting, you mentioned that the Holy Spirit testifies that the Bible is the Word of God. But it seems that it would be more true to say that the Bible is the Word of God in that it testifies to Jesus Christ. This is a critical distinction in understanding what sort of book God has given us, and it is a critical distinction in understanding whether the Spirit testifies to the Bible or whether the Spirit testifies to the person of Jesus Christ.”

Yes, it is a very critical question, but to emphasize again, it is both/and, not either/or. Again I press the issue of epistemology:

The Spirit does testify to Jesus Christ. How do we know? Jesus said the Spirit would do this. How do we know he said he would do this? Initially, through the preaching of the apostles and others appointed by the apostles [as seen in the book of Acts]. Then, after that, through the words written down in the New Testament. The word of God or even the name of God, cannot be separated from the person of God. All that to say is that God stands behind his word. The Bible does testify to Jesus Christ. And the Holy Spirit testifies to the word of Christ. As I stated before, it is reciprocal. Call it both/and. It could also be called perspectival.

What I see in some of these answers to my comments is putting the Incarnation above that of the biblical text itself, as if they are pitted against each other. Bruce Waltke describes this as a "canon within a canon."

The neoorothodox tend to distinguish between Jesus Christ as the Word of God and Scripture as a "witness" to the Word of God... According to neoorthodox theology, biblical statements that do not contribute to the witness to Jesus Christ are not necessarily true. This position is unstable because it exalts Christ by depreciating the text that bears witness to his exaltation. In other words, according to the neoorthodox, one hears the Word of God in the Bible as one hears music on a scratched record. In this way they tend to set up the canon of the message about Jesus Christ (i.e., the music) as more valuable than the whole canon of Scripture (i.e., the record). [An Old Testament Theology, p. 75]

It is this type of thinking (though way below the caliber of Barth) that many evangelicals, who identify themselves as "postmodern," fall into.  D.A. Carson addresses this subject in his book on the Emergent Church.

The gospel of John, which clearly articulates the love command (John 13:34-35), also provides a number of propositions that people must believe if they are to be followers of Christ. The tendency of some emerging writers, whenever a truth question comes up, is to move away from the content of Scripture and to Jesus as the personal Word of God (John 1:1), as the personal truth of God (John 14:6).

This is right in what it affirms, but wrong in the antithesis. The presentation of Jesus as the truth incarnate, as the Word of God, is critically important, and certainly something to rejoice over—but it is a relatively rare theme compared with the biblical emphasis on the truthfulness of God’s words when he speaks. (p. 149, my underline)

Relatively rare is an understatement. Other than John 1 the only other place Christ is called the Word of God is Rev. 19:13. And in the previous verses he is also called "Faithful and True."

How do we know, you know?

At bottom some of the iffy-ness regarding God and his word has to do with the propositional nature of the Bible (displayed in all its various genres), something many people are uncomfortable with. [Aside: isn't that what God's word sometimes does, make us uncomfortable?]  Is knowledge and asking how we know really that confusing and hard to come by? In his criticism of the way postmodernism attains to knowledge (or says it cannot truly be done) Carson offers various solutions, including Critical Realism.

I am surprised that strong postmoderns are so reluctant to acknowledge the place of ‘critical realism.’ Critical realists hold that meaning can be adequately determined, over against both naïve realists, who are inclined to think that meaning can be exhaustively determined, and non-realists, who hold that the objective meaning cannot be determined.

Otherwise put, in the realm of science, critical realists insist that scientific theories do in fact approximate the natural world that exists apart from any scientific descriptions of it (that is why they speak of ‘realism’) but are constantly probed, critiqued, improved, revised, replaced, and evaluated (hence the adjective ‘critical’). But when the strong postmoderns refer to critical realism, their comments are almost always rather dismissive. (p. 110-111)

Scholars such as N.T. Wright have applied the discipline of Critical Realism to the study of the New Testament. He defines Critical Realism similarly as,

a way of describing the process of ‘knowing’ that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence ‘realism’), while also fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies along the spiraling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known (hence ‘critical’)…Knowledge, in other words, although in principle concerning realities independent of the knower, is never itself independent of the knower. (The New Testament and the People of God, p. 35, emphasis his)

That means in applying this to the reading of a text, such as the Bible, we develop “a theory of reading which, at the reader/text stage will do justice both to the fact that the reader is a particular human being and to the fact that the text is an entity on its own, not a plastic substance to be moulded to the reader’s whim.” (p. 62, emphasis his)

All the more is the biblical text an entity, though complex, that can stand on its own because of the God who breathed out its words (2 Tim. 3:16). God is true and so are his promises because he stands behind them. They are fulfilled in Christ,  given to us in the written Word describing the Word incarnate, and applied by the Holy Spirit.

"In your light we see light."  -- Psalm 36:9

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Note added 2/28/17

*Below is the entire context from whence I draw my quotes from the blog Is God's Presence Limited to Scripture? This debate has been happening off and on since the rise of biblical higher criticism, so what I say is likely a rehash of what someone else has already better articulated.  But, after reading through my June 2013 blog post again, I wanted to provide a framework for my reasoning, adding citations of authors that I quoted.